A flow chart to live by

I often find myself as the poor bastard.

Every day in the office kitchen I find bottles of milk open and left out, in the fridge with no date, and empties everywhere. Yesterday I found 11 open and partially used bottles of milk. I’ve designed this flow chart to help educate people (in a way developers can understand) on how to manage milk which is apparently a real challenge for some.

True story... sadly....

I've been working on implementing a fairly large feature on a project at work--

**Sorry. I should rephrase that**

I've been *trying* to work on implementing a fairly large feature on a project at work.

It's slightly complicated because I'm not as "in the know" with the project as I should be. I get tossed around projects a lot as the only designer+developer so I've got my hands in a lot of buckets... Or git repos I should say... My source tree has a lot of tabs open and each project is run by someone with their own ideologies on how stuff should be done and laid out and what not. Basically jumping between these projects leaves you mildly capable on all of them but not amazing at any of individual one them--

--I digress.

There's a bug I've been trying to fix.
--Stupid simple bug, literally just a casting issue or something but there's so much data in this one object that it's taking a few solid minutes of concentration to figure out which variable is busting it all up. It shouldn't take long to fix...

But it has. It has taken 4 days.

FOUR. DAYS.

...To fix what is basically a null reference exception.

Every time I sit down to work on this bug real quick I get pulled away to do a wireframe or change a flow chart or diagram or colour or print styling.

Every. God. Damn. Time.
4 days. Soon to be 5.

My commits are real low at this point guys.

Please boss man, just let me code...

I see posts about automating your work flow, but if your aim is to save time by automation consult this handy chart

Anyone draw out the logic of a process by hand before coding much?

I've been doing that more and more, and it's handy but ... it's also kinda tedious making them on paper or even just in the VS Code extensions I've tried.

I'd really like a way to bust out quick flow charts in VSCode and there's a Draw.io add on and it's ok but lotta fidgeting with flow chats and dragging stuff.

It doesn't have to be pretty and it doesn't have to be super feature rich.... just want to quick bust out a series of steps flow chart style or ... hell any way fast and visual like.

Anyone use anything they really like?

Well, throughout my life I've never really thought about programming. Then one day during some downtime on a backpacking trip with a friend, while I had nothing to do my friend sat there with his computer with the screen all dark, filled with funny colourful text in lines of different length, with some lines even starting more towards the middle of the page than to the left, almost following a vertical wave pattern. He said he was writing a program to control his home remotly as well as working as a security feature that could unlock his home automatically when he got home. I was amazed by the colorful text as well as the fact that he could just create this crazy program out of nothing.
Half a year later I attended my first lecture at the computer science programme. My first program was a command line tool used for baking bread. It asked you how much flour you'd use and how many eggs, then it'd tell you wether or not you'd got the correct ratio. I was blown away by the intuitive nature of programming. I could imagine the control flow as a tree or flow chart in my head. I mean the whole program was only a couple of user inputs followed by an if-statement and a print-statement, but for me it was awe inspiring. I knew then that I'd probably chosen the right path in education.

What is this? A flow chart for learning how algorithms work?
Nope! I call it: dynamic timetable 😎

C# is getting so fucking obfuscated with these null check inceptions. Found the following in my company's code base. Why did it take me and 3 other devs an hour to figure out how to write this if statement into a flowchart?

if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(a?.Id ?? b[0]?.Id))...😫😫😫

FYI: We figured it and also found some bugs with logic, but can you? I'll post our flowchart if ranters are interested.

So to add to the madness:
if(!string.IsNullOrEmpty(a?.Id ?? (b?.Any() ? b[0].Id : null)))...🤯🤯🤯

Just finished making an ER diagram for the 5th time now.
It was less painful this time. (Thanks draw.io)

(About the 4th ER diagram - le professor says "It looks like a flow chart, that's not right", but it's clearly not?)

I'll have to submit the draft tomorrow to the professor, I just hope that he green lights it so I could finalize the project report.

I hate making ER diagrams now.

A whole week for "a new ecommerce system" delivered shortly after the MD declare how simple it would be with some hybrid pseudo code/flow chart on their magic whiteboard.

Words were had.

When your computer science teacher asks to write the psedo code and flow chart first, instead of just coding the program. That frustration!!!!

The first computer I used as a youngster was an iMac G3. We made flow charts and it was magical. I used any excuse possible to get on the computer and make a flow chart.

I've a whole new respect for ElasticSearch. It's codebase is so insanely complex, that I'm seriously contemplating tracing out the flow on a big ass chart. Any suggestions on how you people work and debug so many asynchronous flows?

I have been working on a bug, for almost 6 days (to be read as 3 consecutive weekends), and the best I've done is, conceptually isolate where it's happening. I'm an open source noob, but I feel I've learnt a whole lot during sifting through ES' codebase. :)

!rant (I got down voted for this on Stack Overflow, so I try to discuss the issue with a more professional crowd.)

In a Software Engineering class, we had an assignment to read Parnas' seminal paper on modularization [0]. In this paper, two approaches of dividing a software into modules are discussed:

Traditional Approach: A flow chart is drawn to work out the single processing steps and the program's high-level flow. Then every processing step is turned into a module. This approach doesn't yield very good results.
New Approach: Every design decision will be turned into a module by the means of information hiding. This approach leads to much better results.

My personal interpretation of the term design decision is that the modules are identified as data structures rather than as processing steps of an algorithm. This makes sense, because data structures are much more suitable for information hiding then processing steps of an algorithm. (The information inside a data structure is hidden behind functions, whereas a function only hides more detailed processing steps and no information; the information is actually passed in as arguments.)

Why does the second approach work so much better than the first approach? Here comes my second interpretation: The single processing steps of an algorithm are not replaceable (and thus not reusable), whereas it's possible to convert data structures into other data structures.

And here's my question: Could that be the reason why software development using workflow engines (based on BPMN, for example) never really took off?

My personal experience is that the activities created in such workflows are hardly ever reused, but there often are big data structures passed around all the involved activities, even if most of the activities use only one or two of them.

My question exaggerated: Could we get rid of all those clumsy workflow engines by giving managers Parnas' paper to read?

[0]: On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules (Parnas 1972)

Started with flow chart programming in a robotics club after class in middle school.
Joined another club where I spent the first 3-4 weeks learning Python and JS basics on freecodecamp.
Programming classes on algorithms and frameworks in high school and college.
Beyond that, mostly reading documentation, stackoverflow and some udemy courses.

Guys, so I researched a lot about this but couldn't reach a conclusion. How does chat app work on Android?
I mean you could use XMPP, SSE or socket. But how long is the connection kept open? And what's is the data flow chart from db to push notifications (FCM) to device?